Learning Node
February 23, 2013I'm deep-diving on a bunch of technologies at once:
- node.js, a V8 runtime with communication skills.
- Express, a server for node.
- Jade, a Haml-alike for javascript. Short learning curve, great results.
- LESS, a CSS compiler.
- AngularJS, a data-binding toolkit for the front-end.
- Bootstrap, a css framework created by Twitter.
- Strapdown.js, which provides markdown on Bootstrap pages. Looks like markdown to google, so it's plain-text.
My goals are simple. I want to learn a handful of tools by building someting. I could learn these technologies one at a time, but I've never been successful getting up to speed if I get anything less than full immersion.
I will know I'm done when the site renders something resembling/improving upon the version you see as of this writing. It must retain most of the features of octopress, while adding some ease of use in modifying the project.
likes
I like npm, the package manager. The packages themselves are generally tiny and mostly play nice.
I like LESS a little more than SASS, if only because SASS users go overboard on the number and depth of support files in octopress. It's a bias, I'm sorry.
I like Jade's Haml format. It's easy to work with, and it doesn't conflict with AngularJS's syntax.
I see a lot of potential in both Node and AngularJS. The ability to arbitrarily spawn tiny servers? Sold.
AngularJS is something I'm still getting used to.
Bootstrap is a lot easier to pick up when you're using Jade, because Jade keeps wrangles a lot of the noise of html.